


nobody knows how cold it grows

by friendly_ficus



Series: from a much outdated style [10]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: AU where they're basically gods, Angst and Tragedy, Complicated Relationships, Gen, but we're on the upswing by the end, this is a lot more narrative than some of the other interludes, vague nods to canon and even vaguer nods to d&d
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:47:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26238835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: He is furious and fraying and woe to the one who does him wrong.Interlude Five, Percy
Relationships: Cassandra de Rolo & Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III
Series: from a much outdated style [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/907551
Comments: 8
Kudos: 42





	nobody knows how cold it grows

**Author's Note:**

> sort of also interlude 5.5, cassandra. what can i say, the story of whitestone is the story of the de rolos. i don’t want one without the other.   
> me: the very concept of nobility is evil and divine right is a scam. this fic: has those things. sometimes, the government system of a fantasy world, sucks.

In the vaults beneath the castle on the hill overlooking Whitestone, there’s a coffin. It’s simple, lacking some of the scrollwork or engraving on many of the others. Just a solid box of stone, flecked with specks of residuum. If one were to look under the rim of the lid, on the left side, there’d be an old smear of dried blood to find.

All this to say, there  _ is  _ a coffin. It’s just, well. Percival did not stay buried.

This is a story about falling apart.

\---

When he’s young, more adolescent than adult, the Briarwoods come for dinner. That night, his entire family dies. All but Cassandra, carried away by a twist of luck or fate or the desperate fury of a kitchen maid.

They hang their bodies from the Sun Tree, the de Rolos. He’d be in good company, if there was a him to be. 

Stealing his corpse down is an early rebellion; the branch is bowing just low enough for someone to get at the rope with a bread knife, sawing through it while glancing over his shoulder the whole time. When his body hits the ground with a  _ thud,  _ there’s no flicker of magic. Just sweat and the tang of fear in the air, just the body of a young man in the dirt. The townsfolk mean to get them all, but word of a patrol comes early and they have to abandon the scheme. A woodcutter carries him, wrapped in a carpet, through a long series of tunnels. Keeper Yennen delivers a prayer almost silently, so afraid they are that the echoes will reach unfriendly ears.

(Whitestone has too many legends about improper burials—they don’t want him coming back as a ghost.)

In response to the theft, the Briarwoods kill twenty sons of suspected dissidents. It’s not even personal, when they do it. They’re not interested in personal violence. It’s about  _ power. _

Entombed in the crypts, a bone snaps back into place. Then another, and another; piece by piece, muffled by the coffin, a body comes back together. They didn’t want him coming back as a ghost, after all.

The prayer must’ve been too quiet, when Keeper Yennen said it. Or maybe Pelor had been busy on that particular evening.

A particular kind of rage simmers in the streets of Whitestone. Percival opens his eyes in complete darkness, caught somewhere between life and death and the city. He is drawn into its very foundations and quietly, ruthlessly, he becomes something entirely new.

\---

When she’s young, more child than anything, the Briarwoods come for dinner. That night, her entire family dies. All but her, caught up in Rebecca’s arms as she races for a passage tucked into the kitchen wall like the very hounds of hell are on her heels.

There’s nothing holy about it. No god speaks in her ears, as the serving girl carries her. No god speaks to the serving girl, either. It is nothing predestined. It’s not even about loyalty; the members of the household that die with the de Rolos do not leap heroically in the way of crossbow bolts. They don’t sacrifice themselves to buy extra time. They just die. 

It’s about love—or, if not love, at least it’s about the personal. Rebecca has a sister, only a year Cassandra’s junior. She knows the shape of a little girl in her arms, and she knows a way out, and she knows that she has to try. Not because of faith or status, but because Cassandra is a child and something like fury pours through the veins of the girl who serves the soup, something denies the horror of the evening, the violence of the world. The opportunity to act presents itself, and Rebecca snatches her up. This is the connection, Cassandra trembling in trembling arms that can only carry her thanks to a flood of adrenaline. For an endless run down the hill into the city, this is the only real thing in the world.

In the basement beneath Pelor’s temple on this first, terrible night, Keeper Yennen’s hands shake as he anoints her forehead with holy oil. Ten years old, is Cassandra de Rolo, and ten years old is far too young to bear this burden. But every other member of her family is dead, slaughtered to the last—Cassandra, ten years old, is the star that Whitestone must now hang its hopes on. She has to be. She is the heir to Whitestone, to her family; she the rightful ruler of her city and the world cannot take it from her, the Keeper cannot deny her claim.

Rebecca gathers her family; an older brother and a little sister, their father likely slaughtered with the rest of the castle guards. They speak to their neighbors, secure a couple packs of supplies. They crack open a dusty wardrobe beneath the pulpit and take weapons. 

Cassandra trembles, when Keeper Yennen finishes the symbol on her brow. Tears stream down her face, screams echo in her ears. Pelor's mark is hot against her skin, makes her feel confused and feverish along with her horror.

“You are the city’s hope,” the Keeper says, and she thinks:  _ I’m ten. _

“We have to go now,” Rebecca’s big brother says. “I know the logging trails around the city—if we get moving now, they’ll be at a loss until the sun comes up.”

And so they slip away into the woods. They stay nowhere longer than a few hours, for the first string of days. The Parchwood rustles, strings brambles in the path of their pursuers. Cassandra runs and runs and  _ runs,  _ sometimes in Rebecca’s arms and sometimes on Candor’s back and sometimes on her own two feet, little Petra trading places with her through the journey.

She dreams of her siblings and her mother and her father, dreams of the castle, dreams of the crypts. At her brow the oil smears until it’s gone but she feels it linger there as a physical weight. Her city loves her, she knows her city loves her, she can feel it blazing in her chest. She is obliged to love it back.

Cassandra is lawful and legitimate and her very soul screams for revenge.

Nine years will pass before she sees her city again.

\---

In a heart of stone, Percy sleeps. Or, no, it isn’t sleep. In a heart of stone, safe from the violence of the city and far from its suffering, Percy  _ changes. _

He never does push the lid off the coffin; he steps fully-formed from the stone pillar that supports the crypts. He can feel them all around him, generations of ghosts pressing against the other side to watch him move, watch him stretch his fingers with something too calculated to be wonder.

His eyes are a deep, solid blue. Nearly black, but not reflective; he pulls the room in, the opposite of glowing.

Above him, miles away, sword clashes against pickaxe against shovel. Blood spills, paints the cobblestones red. It is the first coordinated attempt at revolution that the city sees.

It has been three years since his death, not that he knows it at the time. That they will fail to overthrow their tyrants, he knows instinctively. It’s not something he can pinpoint, exactly, but there’s not  _ enough.  _ He can’t imagine the city streets but he can feel the gaps in the barricades, the desperation of a resident reaching for a friend and finding them fallen.

**“Too soon,”** he tells his ancestors, and ignores the howling specters that claw at the walls. He steps back into the stone, into the heart of the city, into a space that isn’t a space. This is a place where the world cannot touch him. He watches. He waits.

In the darkest corner of the crypt, from the depths of a shadow, something chuckles.

\---

Cassandra grows up in hiding, instead of under the thumb of torturers. It gets her familiar with a different kind of fear, that someone’s seen through their disguises, that their story isn’t going to be believed. She isn’t Cassandra de Rolo for a long time. She isn’t  _ Cassandra  _ for a long time, once she can consistently answer to a different name. She’s Adnys and Moira and Chrysanthemum, Daisy and Dione and even Rebecca, once, when she has to scramble for a name to give a suspicious shopkeeper.

The only place she’s always herself is in her dreams; Whitestone screams in her ears at night, echoes with cries of pain and calls to action.  _ Where is my daughter,  _ it says, it doesn’t say. A city cannot speak. Her forehead burns.  _ Where is my hope. _

This is a world where Cassandra gets to keep her anger, where the flame of it is fanned by the suffering of her people and unquenched by any guilt. She does not dream of anything like disaster but she wants to get her hands around the throat of Sylas Briarwood and choke him to death, wants to cleave Delilah’s head from her neck. By the time she’s sixteen, Cassandra is righteous in her violence and does not  _ want  _ to care what blood must stain her hands for her to reach her goal—somehow, still, she grows up. She never quite gets the hang of not caring.

They come to her slowly, filtering through patrols and barriers. Not many, not enough, but people are drawn to her like moths to a bonfire. They bring her news in whispers, stories of vanished neighbors and slaughtered livestock, of crops rotting in the outlying fields. They find her whether she’s Evelina or Melinda or Antiope and they wait for her to pull them aside, to bring them back to wherever they’re staying for the night, to send them to the hidden glade in the Parchwood where they’re gathering even now, one by one. Her people, her city; they haven’t vanished at all.

Year by year, day by day, her adopted siblings—who folded her into their family when she was nothing but a burden, who cared for her when she was nothing but a liability, a curse—build what lives they can build, interrupted by frequent moves and name-changes. Eventually they plant roots in Kymal, near mountains that are so like home but so unlike it. Cassandra, seventeen and chafing under a dozen different names, leaves a letter and takes her sword, and starts making for the Parchwood.

_ The city is waiting for me,  _ she writes, trying to capture how much she loves them, how much it means that they’ve chosen to love her for so long, how angry she is that it isn’t enough.  _ I can’t rest, sometimes, I hear it shouting in the distance. I must go to it. _

_ If I could give it up, I.  _ She shakes her head, tears off the end of the paper.  _ I love you,  _ she writes instead.  _ When it’s safe, I’ll send for you. _

(They look for her, when morning comes, but she’s already gone. All four of them have learned to hide too well.)

\---

There’s another revolution that drags Percy from his workshop to prowl the crypts. He is building something, he is working in a forgotten forge, secreted away from reality. He can feel it buzzing in his fingertips, hunched over his blueprints and prototypes. Something that can change the world.

It’s been seven years. It is still too soon.

A ghost rattles over the dusty stone floor, weeping noisily, and Percy considers what-was and what-will-be. He dreams, in his sleep in the heart of the city, of a great machine that is the world. Pistons and levers, dials and gears and the ticking of a thousand clocks, all measuring power. And in his dreams, in his workshop between worlds, he weighs blackpowder and feels the axis shifting.

Something steps out of the deepest shadow, offers him a mocking bow.

**_My name is Orthax,_ ** the demon croons.  **_You must be the lord of this castle._ **

Power wells up in Percy’s throat. His good sense whispers at him to send the shadow away. Another part of him is tilting his head, taking it all in. 

(This is the second revolution—he is tired of failure. He is tired of the taste of blood.)

On the last prototype, his hands trailed blue-black sparks over the firing chamber. He needs to know what it means.

When the demon extends a hand, he shakes it.

He figures out Bad News sometime in the years between shaking Orthax’s hand and the third revolution. Pepperbox is a collaboration, the shadowy figure offering little tidbits here and there, but Bad News is  _ his  _ blood and bone, the smoke tastes like the ashes in  _ his  _ mouth, and when he fits it together at last something clicks into place.

\---

Two years later, he catches Delilah Briarwood’s soul in a box of runes and shadow, grinding it down to nothingness.

The people of Whitestone are desperate enough to be careful, to plot out exit strategies and listen at keyholes. They cannot fail—there is nothing more to lose, a few hundred dissidents whittled down to eighty. The city hears Percy’s call—the very stones shake when he speaks with the  _ other  _ part of his voice, the new timbre. 

Nine years after the night he died, Cassandra comes out of the treeline with a sword in her hands. From there, the dominoes fall.

And Percy can feel them, the  _ clack-clack-clack  _ of pieces fitting together. The machine of his mind sings, calling out:  _ here  _ is Delilah’s destruction,  _ there  _ is Sylas’ own demise. And before him, just around the next bend in the road—

His old friend Orthax steps out of the shadows and Percy shoots him in the chest with a residuum bullet. Whitestone  _ burns,  _ moves sluggishly through his body, and the stone heart in his chest lets out a single beat.

**_Masterpiece,_ ** Orthax growls, one hand sharpening into claws.  **_You could have been my masterpiece._ **

He gets one step closer, brings his Pepperbox up to take another shot, when a shining blade pierces the shadow’s back and drags down through him, trailing radiant flames.

“Hello, brother,” Cassandra says, stepping through the dissolving darkness. There’s blood streaked across her forehead, a bite wound on her arm. It’s the first time he’s seen her in nine years.

“You’re here,” he breathes, because of course she’s here. She’s  _ there,  _ five minutes ago, Sylas’ demise. She’s  _ there,  _ a quiet water wheel in the machine, shifting power into power. Not as loud as his blackpowder explosions, but somehow steady.

“I dreamed of you,” is all she says, and she never does tell him if they were good dreams.

The rest of the traitors, what’s left of them after the battle, are given to Whitestone for judgement. Cassandra, nineteen years old, pulls the gallows lever.

White hair wisps at her temples, too. The stress of a thousand lies or something else, Percy isn’t quite sure. But she’s not like him,not really, bleached all the way through with a stone heart in his chest. He tries to explain it once, that he sees the world as a series of catastrophes, all waiting for the right push over the edge, and she looks at him without any comprehension.

(For Cassandra, for one other person in the world, for the last family he has left; Percy makes a second rifle. She never does tell him what she thinks of it.)

\---

Cassandra loves her brother. Maybe it’s complicated—maybe it’s  _ too  _ complicated sometimes, the tension in her shoulders when he’s in the room and the way she can’t trust him not to poke at things—but she does love him. Whatever he is now.

“We put him to rest,” Keeper Yennen assures her, apprehension in his eyes. “What we could not do for the rest of your family, we did for him. The proper rites were observed.”

She nods. He said that the last time she came to him with concerns, after all.

Percival doesn’t eat, sometimes. He doesn’t sleep more often than not, clanking away in the workshop the Briarwoods had constructed in a sub basement for some bizarre purpose. And he—he doesn’t hurt people, doesn’t threaten anyone, but he  _ unnerves  _ them. He unnerves a great deal of the city, if she’s honest with herself about it. 

Something nudges her sometimes, an itch on the back of her neck, the press of a hand on her shoulder when he’s been stewing too long. When he’s got some plan half-worked; a spider’s web, but far more precarious. Sometimes it’s on trade or crop yield and she has to go through his notes, scribbled in his fine hand, to take the teeth out of whatever scheme he’s brewing.

Whitestone has suffered too much, for too long. She can’t let him upset the denizens of the city, can’t afford to impede reconstruction efforts by trying to dig up blackmail on faraway rulers. Can’t nod along when he talks about the world as a mess of contradicting systems, waiting to be exploited.

Cassandra loves her brother. It’s complicated. 

She doesn’t let him meet Rebecca and Candor and Petra, when they visit, and he refuses to accompany her down to Keeper Yennen’s services. Neither of them are quite sure what they’re protecting.

He doesn't ever reach out a hand, not really. He'll sit across from her at teatime and he'll smile at a clever turn of phrase but he never—he never hurts her. It's important that he never hurts her. He just never tries to connect.

And in her heart, where the echoes of the congregation still sing at her coronation, she feels only coldness from him.

\---

Percy leaves Whitestone with weapons in hand, something tugging at his senses. He spends a slew of months in Vasselheim, digging into the powers of the city and learning the way they counter each other. He visits Kymal, Westruun, Emon. 

All the while, slipping the right note into the file of a treacherous clerk or tipping off the right discontented merchant, he is building and building and building. A plan he can almost see the edges of, sometimes, like spokes in the great wheel of the world—he’s not driven to  _ do  _ anything with it, but it’s. It’s something to do, he supposes.

(Here is the truth: it’s not even personal. It’s about power,  _ his  _ power, and learning what he can do.)

He tells himself that he’s doing Cassandra a favor, not visiting often. He is leaving her a legacy; she has to be Cassandra of the Revolution, Cassandra of the Crypts, Cassandra with her dead loyalists and a city on her shoulders—executioner and administrator all in one, and Whitestone’s, always the city’s before she can be anything else. No part of her can belong to her brother.

He promises himself, leaving a door unlocked so a vengeful assassin can slip into a townhouse in some fucking city or another, that he doesn’t even miss her.

(He does, he does, he does.)

\---

The city does not ask her to condemn Percival. She doesn’t dream of it, doesn’t feel the weight of her signet ring drag her hand down. 

_ The city doesn’t  _ ask  _ you to do anything,  _ Rebecca writes, long returned to her life in Kymal, but Cassandra knows it is a lie.

She tends her great-aunt’s garden and attends meetings of advisors and guild leaders, always trying to grow something up from the tangled roots of suffering. Percival writes rarely, but when he does he’s always talking of legacy, of governance, of power. 

Cassandra meets with the masons guild and the logging bosses and thinks that he’s wrong, when he describes power as some intangible web of secrets. As something you can influence without seeing. This is what she knows: you need stone for your walls and stone for your bridges, you need firewood and support beams alike.

When he visits, the last time that they don’t know will be the last time, Percival brings a sheaf of papers and observations on the work of half a dozen systems at work, and he tells her she should appoint a council to rule Whitestone.

(For all his talk of legacy, she should be used to it; all this time has passed, and he is still hypocrite enough to tell her what her city needs.)

\---

Cassandra meets him in her private study, a tea tray on the desk. The rifle he made her is mounted on the wall, and weak winter light shines through the windows. She’s had stained glass put in, the crest of the city laid out in shades of green and bands of metal, that haloes her chair.

He doesn’t notice it while he’s laying the idea out, caught up in the lure of progress and the tumble of history and the snares of power; he doesn’t notice how very still she’s gone.

\---

Percival is good at talking about wisdom. She loves him, doesn’t she? Doesn’t she love her brother? Isn’t he her brother? He’s good at talking about wisdom. It's complicated.

It seems he’s cast himself as her counterweight, her outside observer, her judge. She doesn’t need this, doesn’t need him to go over her last year of decisions with a fine-tooth comb, to take her measure and find her wanting.

Cassandra is not prone to rage, but it stills her hands anyway the first time he says  _ ruling council. _

Cassandra is not—

Cassandra was not—

Cassandra  _ will not be  _ uprooted again. She will not be torn from her position again, wrenched away from her city and her rule and her people.

Keeper Yennen spoke the blessing when she was nothing more than a grieving child hiding in the temple basement, made her the heir. He spoke before the city upon her ascension, at the traditional ceremony, had charged her with the protection of all these lands. She has anchored herself to this castle as Percival has swanned about, cavorting with devils and demons and who knows what else. She has promised the stonemasons and the farmers and the merchants and the clerics, she has governed and covered for his absence and for his  _ existence  _ with all the rumors it entails. She is conviction incarnate and he will not steal her city from her and he will not steal her from her city.

She lets him finish, because she has manners, but when he looks up from his papers for her approval he is met with a blank, cold expression she has never let him see before.

“This is not your decision to make,” she says, lips numb. “This is not your city to rule.”

\---

“This is not your city to rule,” his sister says, something terrible building in her eyes. 

“Don’t be stubborn,” he insists, sure that he’s misheard something. Surely Cassandra knows that he’s—that he’s  _ different  _ than he used to be. That he’s offering her an insight she can’t overlook. “At least read my plans.”

His fingers twitch against the pages, pinned against the surface of her desk like some kind of bug. The room darkens, not in a way he can attribute to the waning sunlight. Torchlight from a sconce glunts off the blank barrels of Pepperbox, wiped clean when Orthax died.

“I am the ruler of these lands.” Where is her regard, her trace of uneasy awe, her carefully tempered joy at seeing him? Her voice is brittle as a dead branch, snapping.

“Sister...” he tries, and knows it’s a misplay as soon as it leaves his mouth.

“Before I am your sister I am the ruler of these lands.”

\---

“Before I am your sister I am the ruler of these lands,” Cassandra says, feeling nothing so much as anger, cold all the way through. “Before I am your sister I am the leader of these people. Before I am  _ anything,  _ I am Whitestone’s. And you would have me  _ set myself aside?” _

She loves her brother, doesn’t she? She doesn’t know the answer right now.

\---

“And you would have me  _ set myself aside?”  _

It would be easier if she were snarling, emotional. Then he could be distant, logical, verbose and impersonal. He could manage it, could bear it. If it could be made impersonal, perhaps—

The fading sunlight catches in the green shards of residuum, embedded in the window behind her. She has never looked so distant from him, so terribly mortal and strange and disagreeable.

_ You’ll die someday,  _ he nearly says,  _ and where will the city be then? _

Before he can speak he feels the grip of Pepperbox, before he realizes his hand has left the table, that it’s resting on the holster of his gun. The sensation breaks through the tumble of his thoughts. 

Percy stands abruptly, wrenches his hand away from it and puts ten paces between himself and Cassandra, putting the length of the room to the test. All the while, she watches him with the green light resting on her brow in an odd reflection, something like a crown.

\---

Cassandra has advisors, a secretary, the castle guard and the servants—Cassandra has all the souls of Whitestone on her shoulders and the blessed regard of Pelor as her city’s patron—she has no obligation to the brother that has become so strange. 

_ How we’ve fallen apart,  _ she thinks, brutally clear and sharp enough to cut.  _ Look at you, hand on your pistol. Look at me. _

Does she love her brother? It’s the wrong question. Does she love her brother  _ enough? _ Enough to let him threaten her, to threaten all she’s built, all she  _ could  _ build?

She has no obligation to hear him out. She has a coffin and a crypt of ghosts, has to live with the fact that she will never know where the rest of her family’s bones lie. It cannot be enough, that they are family. It cannot be enough to forgive an insult like this one.

If anything—and she glances at the rifle on the wall and nothing is enough, even as the horror crosses his face and he pulls his hand away from his gun—if anything, she has an obligation to protect her city  _ from  _ him.

\---

“Get out,” orders Lady Cassandra Johanna von Musel Klossowski de Rolo.

_ Never return,  _ something howls wordlessly. 

And Percy, tangled up somehow with his weapon and his stone heart and whatever remains in the wreck of his soul, obeys.

He is cold for a very long time, once he leaves Whitestone. 

\---

Emon, for Percy, is a turning point. Emon with Vex’ahlia is an opening of borders, a crack in the wall he’s raised between himself and the rest of the world. And as they fight other things, dragons and fey and who knows what’s next, he comes to care for their ragtag group, comes to think of them as friends. And he sees—they don’t  _ fit  _ in his calculations. They’re either the most powerful pieces in the machine, or entirely outside of it and he can’t—he doesn’t  _ understand. _

In Kraghammer, he stumbles and Vex takes his hand. In the Underdark, Pike wraps a cut in a bandage of light, wipes away his blood. In the shadow of the ziggurat, Vax dives through the shadows to defend him, fearless or self-sacrificing or both. In Ioun’s library Grog claps him on the shoulder, sternly tells him not to wander off again. Scanlan takes his watch in the Feywild, tells him to get more sleep, that he looks worn at the edges. 

Maybe he loves them. Maybe this is what family is, what he and Cassandra lost what must be eight years ago, now. Maybe this is what broke between them. But he—in a heart of stone, alone but for the company of ghosts, Percy changed. He doesn’t know if he can handle it, stone heart cracking with the swell of emotion, with caring.

But it’s personal, this time. The world falling to pieces. He wants to fix it not because he  _ can,  _ but because he wants it fixed.

\---

_ Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo the third,  _ Cassandra says, each word dragging out, broken glass in his ears.  _ Come home. Help us. _

\---

“I don’t know if we can go,” he tells Vex, hand shaking as he runs it through his hair. She’s crouching in front of where he’s sitting, his back against a tree, frowning as she looks him over. He supposes his little stumble when he heard Cassandra speak was embarrassing, but he can’t reach the feeling right now.

(Some part of him is terrified. Some part of him is reaching, blindly, looking for a vein of stone to fold himself away into, looking for the shadow of the machine he’d dreamed. Cassandra would not call unless she had to, and he is shuddering with implication.)

Vex has sent the others away, to the nearby tavern for food and various other supplies. She did it to give him a measure of privacy, an hour or two to come to terms with whatever this latest revelation means. Now she crouches in front of him and tilts her head, waiting.

“Sometimes we have to sacrifice to achieve our endgame,” he whispers, the words impossibly bitter in his mouth. “It’s messy and unpleasant business, but we need a larger victory; I will not see us backed into a corner with no way out. And Whitestone is nothing if not a corner.”

“You want to sacrifice too much,” Vex says. “You and my brother both, sometimes. You’ve got more in common than you know.”

“I want us to do what we  _ have to do—” _

“Not one more. Enough dead, enough losing, enough being willing to die,” Vex’ahlia growls at him, eyes hard as diamonds. She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Pyrah was enough of a loss. We don’t need to sacrifice any more, Percy, we need to  _ win.  _ And if that win means starting with your  _ home,  _ I’m all for it.”

Saundor’s blood is still in her hair. She is Vex’ahlia, the wind in the trees, the inhale before an arrow fires. Her hand on his arm is warm, he feels it through his coat, scorching. In his chest, beneath calcified layers of regret and pain and loneliness, he can feel his own heart beating.

“Why should we suffer,” she murmurs, “if we have the power to stop it?”

And he realizes, autumn wind all around the both of them, that he has absolutely no answer to give her.

**Author's Note:**

> Title for this fic is a lyric from “Poor Boy” by Nick Drake.   
> Percy gets revenge, but not exactly revenge; he gets conspiracy (in the treason sense, not the conspiracy theory sense) it made sense when i made the outline three years ago what can i say. he gets to put things together but he rarely gets the satisfaction of seeing them through, it’s kinda sad it’s kinda not. the machine he imagines isn’t a literal real machine. percy is Coping with a lot in this fic, but despite the bad world state at this point in the story, he's kinda getting to a better place personally by this point.  
> Cassandra is kind of like, an oath of vengeance paladin maybe? this story isn’t very concerned with game mechanics but that’s the general vibe. i got to play a vengeance paladin for a while and i loved her so much that i just kinda... sprinkled her into Cassandra's characterization. this might be controversial but i think if it was purely a fantasy world and not a game played by 21st century people it would be WAY more difficult to change the way that whitestone is governed, _especially_ if cassandra didn't have to work past an association with the briarwoods. if she's there ruling all the time and has (in this story) the only valid claim, i can't see her setting that power aside. yes i still think nobility and the idea that some people are born to rule is SO bad but cassandra can have little a Rightful King Returns trope, as a treat  
> the interludes in this series are my favorite thing to write, and i hope you enjoyed this one :) leave a comment and let me know what you think!


End file.
